


Don't Flinch Or Bleed In Public

by WatchMyFavesSuffer



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, Anorexia, F/M, Gen, Hallucinations, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, giving tommy an eating disorder is Officially Too Far, i have lost the war against parentheticals, i know this i embrace this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26709079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchMyFavesSuffer/pseuds/WatchMyFavesSuffer
Summary: Tommy just wants to have things under control.Or, on getting sober and then cross-addicted in 1930s Birmingham.(Yes, I have officially gone off the deep end and given Tommy Shelby, OBE, an eating disorder.)
Relationships: Ada Shelby & Tommy Shelby, Arthur Shelby & Tommy Shelby, Michael Gray & Tommy Shelby, Polly Gray & Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark, past Tommy/Grace
Comments: 20
Kudos: 59





	1. Chapter 1

“Dinner’s on!” Ada calls. Tommy hears Karl’s feet rushing down the hall.

“Am I goin’ deaf or did I not hear ye washin’ up, Karl?” Then the dragging sound of his feet changing course.

Tommy smiles to himself at the predictable patterns in the lives of his family, patterns that remind him they are something other than planets drifting past each other in the dark of space.

He takes off his glasses and lays them on the desk, massaging the sides of his nose where the frames left their imprint. Ada appears in the doorway. “Aren’t you going to sit down with us, Tommy?”

He shakes his head and gestures at a pile of papers. “Too much work and not enough appetite, Ada.”

“I’m letting you hide out from Lizzie’s wrath here, least you can do is make an appearance at the dinner table every once in a while.”

“Nothing promotes warm family feeling like a visit from Tommy Shelby, OBE, is that it?” He smiles wryly.

Ada sighs and smiles. “Dunno why I bother with you, Tom.” She turns her back, and Tommy’s contrived smile falls. He slips his glasses back on.

The glasses are just pretense anyway, because the words in front of him blur and slide around the page like a puddle of spilled whiskey. Whiskey, incidentally, is precisely what made Lizzie banish him in the first place. He’d been too drunk to make it up the stairs, and she told him to get away from their children or else she’d shoot him. (Fair enough.)

He’d called Ada and she’d half-walked, half-carried him into the car and then into a spare room at her flat. He woke up stripped to the waist with a puddle of his own sick on his trousers. He handed her a thousand pound to pour out all the alcohol in the place (“Keep your money, Tom, I weren’t going to let you drink anyway.”)

The predictable headache started that night. He called Arthur and had all business calls rerouted to Ada’s house. He’d sworn off drink before, more to prove a point than anything else, and he knew it only got worse from here. Soon came the restlessness: he paced until his feet wore pale spots in his sister’s lush carpet. Then the shakiness and the sweating, and he sat beside the telephone, gritting his teeth to summon the strength to remain upright, a cold cloth at the ready to dab at his damp, feverish forehead. Luckily, it was the week after Christmas, and not much business needed doing. A few calls with factory foremen, making sure Johnny Dogs was overseeing the gin business. (Johnny, for his part, could tell something was off, but was either too Christmas-drunk to ask or too used to receiving non-answers to press him.)

Ada comes in and leaves glasses of water while he’s sleeping. Twice or three times a night he jerks awake, sweating and panting or vomiting bile over the side of the bed. One night, he hears Karl and Ada leave and start the car, headed for Aunt Pol’s: must be New Year’s.

(Well, here’s to a good year.)

Now, he’s back on his feet, sequestered in a remote room surrounded by books and pretending to do paperwork. What he really wants is to put his head down right there on the desk and sleep for maybe a fortnight. Instead, he puts his coat on and gets in the car.

* * *

The smell of coal coke and horse shit greets him: sweet home Birmingham. The sun has slipped below the horizon, but the air is dirtied blue-grey with smoke. It is never quite dark and never quite bright here. He should go to his office, but something like habit takes him to the Garrison. (His sister wouldn’t approve, he knows. If he’d announced his departure, she would have given him that look that says “You may be smart, Tommy Shelby, but you’re also quite stupid.” And maybe she’s right.)

No one’s there, not even the barkeep, who Arthur had probably given the night off after a successful New Year’s Eve. There is something eerie about the pub when it’s empty. The chairs are up on the tables, the dust dancing in the shafts of watery grey moonlight. But then again, everything seems a bit strange right now— he’s not used to being sober at night. He remembers his crusade: to prove he could control himself, that he didn’t need to drink. Happy New Year, indeed. Tommy sighs and stares at a bottle of rum behind the bar as though it were taunting him.

Anger suddenly overtakes him, building to a high, keening whine like a broken automobile engine. Before he’s fully aware of it, he whips his gun out of his coat and shoots the bottle. He sees the glass bend to the will of the bullet, watches it shatter then fly in every direction as though in slow motion. The liquor inside goes splashing, like blood out of a body torn to shreds by a landmine. He feels a few drops hit his face.

He hears clattering upstairs. The electric lights flick on.

“Oi!” someone yells. Before he sees him, he hears the telltale sound of a gun cocking. He whirls around (panting, eyes dilated and wild) toward the sound, pointing his pistol at whoever was headed down the stairs.

It’s just Michael, shirtless under an untied robe. And, a few paces behind him, a blonde wearing Michael’s shirt, comically large on her tiny frame. Tommy lowers his gun, shaken back to reality at the sight of his cousin. He resumes breathing.

Cooly, as though nothing had happened, he greets his cousin. “Good evening, Michael. Good evening, Miss…?”

“Emma.” The blonde, wide-eyed and scared, supplies.

“Good evening, Emma.” Tommy says.

Michael turns to her, whispers a few words and offers a few pound out of his robe pocket for a cab. She looks from Thomas to Michael, sensing there was a problem afoot, probably related to the Peaky Blinders, and definitely not something she wanted to be involved in. She grabs the cash, then gets her coat off the rack and makes a hasty exit.

Michael, still bewildered, places his gun on the bar. “Is there a reason you’re shooting up the merchandise, Tom?”

“Is there a reason you’re sleeping in the flat above our pub?” He replies, still aloof.

“Asked you first.” Michael says, tying his robe.

Tommy takes a cigarette out of its case, runs it along his lower lip before clamping his lips around it and lighting up. He scratches an eyebrow idly with his thumb as he exhales. “Just a bit of fun, Michael. Just a bit of fun.”

Michael’s brow furrows. “You need a touch a’ snow, Tom? I’ve got some upstairs.”

“No, no.” Tom places a hand on Michael’s arm as though to steady himself. The gesture is absentminded and surprisingly vulnerable.

“When’s the last time you ate something?”

He searches his memory. “Two days.”

“I’ll take you to mine, make you some toast and tea.” He puts a steadying hand on Tommy’s back.

He shakes his head vaguely. “Not hungry.” He’s not lying: his appetite had vanished.

“C’mon. Even the Great Tommy Shelby needs food.”

Hm. _The Great Tommy Shelby._


	2. Chapter 2

Ada pesters him to join her and Karl at the dinner table one time too many, so he moves out as soon as possible. The moment Lizzie agrees to take him back (read: the minute she believes that he’s actually sober and not running some sort of con job on her), he moves back in with her and the kids. And, once he’s back, Lizzie doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Maybe because she’s just so chuffed about him not drinking, or maybe she just sees this disinterest in food as another peculiar habit he picked up after the war. Dispensation was made for these kinds of things. 

The alcohol withdrawal makes eating difficult; at first it’s no more complicated than that. He’s not thinking about food, and when it’s offered to him, it makes his stomach turn. And, honestly, Tommy had long been a bit disdainful of the concept of being human, of needing things like food and sleep and the warm touch of someone who loved you. He halfway-criticizes himself for it ( _you’ve read enough Greek dramas to know hubris when you see it, Shelby_ ) but he mostly pretends like it isn’t happening. 

When the symptoms of withdrawal subside, he still can’t eat. It unnerves him a little, this inability to complete a task as simple as dinner, so he tries not to look directly at it. Until he can’t anymore, because the prospect of sitting down and eating a full meal fills him with inexplicable terror.

He realizes what he fears isn’t the food itself, but the prospect of not feeling hungry anymore. The starvation is its own kind of high— not immediate like opium, but slow-creeping and sweet, the same way love or sleep comes over you. Nothing much can bother him when he’s in the soft haze of emptiness. The nightmares even become less frequent, as he plunges into a dreamless sleep most night, tired down to his bones. He still has plenty to grieve for, plenty of guilt ready to hound him— Grace is dead and it’s his fault, ditto for John, and Lizzie probably thinks of slitting his throat in his sleep (and he’s not sure he can blame her.) But when he is numb and hungry, he’s no more capable of remorse or sorrow than a ghost. The feelings follow him from room to room, sure as his own shadow, but they don’t quite make it inside. It’s like he’s squeezed his heart flat and nothing can fit in the two-dimensional space he’s made of it. He becomes a target too slim to shoot at.

The issue of keeping this new addiction hidden from his family becomes obvious rather soon.

It’s a board meeting of the Shelby Company, Ltd. The issue at hand was nothing too complicated, just an issue with getting opium through American ports. 

“Can’t we hide it in the crates for the automobile parts? It’s worked just fine for the gin.” Pol suggests, standing half-bathed in shadow against a wall and exhaling smoke from the cigarette she has perched in a holder. 

“That works fine in Detroit. But in Nee York, they do random inspections of the crates— paranoid about anarchists shipping in bombs from overseas.” 

“Well, what about the Mafia? How do they get cargo into New York?” Michael asks.

“They have men in the police and the longshoremen’s union.” 

“We know how to turn a few coppers, don’t we Tom?” Arthur says, probably high on cocaine and already gearing up for action, ever the good soldier. 

Tommy shakes his head. ”That’s not enough— we need to pay off the dockworkers. Which is why I need  _you_ , Arthur, to meet with their union delegate. He and his wife and sailing into London for vacation on Saturday. Take them to a nice meal, and over the after-dinner cognac, offer his men a cut of the opium trade.”

“Happy to do it Tom, but don’t you think you’d better handle this. The, er, negotiating and all?” Arthur asks, a flicker of doubt in his voice.

Tommy probably  _should_ be the one to negotiate this deal, but the idea of going to dinner in London, picking up a knife and fork and eating in the way normal people do was beyond terrifying: it was simply out of the question.

“Well, as some of you may know, I’ve decided to stay away from liquor for the time being. Americans don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink.” 

As far as lies go, this one is good enough, especially for being made up on the fly. Still, Tommy winces inwardly: he’d essentially just admitted that no drinking lade him weak, made him less able to do his job. Still, better than admitting to everyone that he was suddenly, frighteningly incapable of doing the most basic of tasks to keep himself alive. 

He’ll have to be more proactive about throwing his family off his scent. 

Placating Arthur is easy—they’d been in France together. Whatever parts of them came back from the mud had to get out of bed one way or another. No judgment among those souls still lost together in purgatory. 

Finn, though he’s becoming a man so quickly that sometimes it scares Tommy, is still young enough to have heroes. Tommy isn’t sure Finn is even capable of doubting him, the way most people never think the foundation of their house might spontaneously crumble.

Michael is smart, too smart for his own good— and too much like Tommy, if he’s honest. Tommy hadn’t forgotten what had happened to his cousin when he was in the orphanage: Michael had seen Hell. And anyway, after the incident at the Garrison, he knew his cousin suspected  _something_ . If Tommy wasn’t careful, he’d catch on. Best to keep away.

Aunt Pol presented the biggest challenge—not only did she know him better than just about anyone, but she was used to seeing ghosts. And more and more, that’s what Tommy feels like he’s becoming.

He’s not so delusional, just by the by, that he believes he doesn’t need any sustenance at all: he drinks a glass of orange juice in the morning, which feels something like food. He drinks tea incessantly, and water. When the hunger gets to be too much and he’s worried about blacking out, he wanders into his kitchen, tears a hunk off a loaf of bread and chokes it down. He stays away from the house at teatime if he can help it, but when he can’t avoid it, he’ll eat a few bites of meat and excuse himself to go work. 

There’s something perversely thrilling about the whole thing, the way all things that are dangerous are thrilling to a Shelby. It’s almost like a game: how will he avoid his staff of cooks, asking if he wants something to eat? How long can he ignore the coldness and the ache inside? And how can he function on nothing but will, like something from another world, like something raised from the dead and animated by nothing but prayer? Because Tommy is convinced he can outsmart anyone, even his own body, even the God who built it. 


	3. Chapter 3

Tommy finds himself looking in the mirror a lot more than he used to. Something in his mind, some bridge that used to connect perceptions and realities, had weakened and splintered over the years and had finally broken like a rotted stick. He swears he looks no different, or paradoxically, larger than he’s ever looked, then he’ll get dressed and find the gap between his wrist and his cuff larger than ever. He can’t make his thighs touch anymore. Negative space is taking over his silhouette. It makes him feel unbalanced, this not knowing what’s happening to his body, this disappearance of flesh that he can’t see until he’s face to face with the evidence. He’ll see his hipbones jutting out as he steps into the shower, and they catch him by surprise. It feels _wrong_ , and he’ll stare at them in the mirror, cupping them with shaking hands. There’s something garish about his appearance, the skin stretched directly over his skull and the bones of his chest beginning to emerge— but something satisfying, too. He looks like something trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Come to think of it, he looks the way he did after the War.

Tommy makes his way slowly down the stairs, his vision swimming black and fuzzy at the edges like a badly-tuned radio.

He stops his head maid as she bustles into the kitchen.

“Frances, I didn’t give you a Christmas gift, did I?”

She looks at him warily, torn between honesty and deference.

“Well. No sir, but you weren’t well—“

“Can’t have that, can we? I’ll make it up to you: how would you like the morning off, all paid?”

“ _Today_ , Mr. Shelby?”

“Starting today and continuing until— let’s say the summer, shall we?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Are you _sure_ , Mr. Shelby?”

“Tell the whole kitchen staff: come in at suppertime from now on. Good?”

“Very good, sir!”

This is maybe the worst thing Tommy did— worse even than the killing, because he never kills anyone who didn’t sign up for this life, and because he knows he will probably be murdered one day, too. The worst thing Tommy does is pretend to be kind. People in Birmingham— _honest_ people, come to him with their problems and think of him as their friendly neighborhood MP. His staff, for all the ugliness they’ve had to witness, are more than fairly compensated, and seemed to think of him as a fairly good boss, if not a good man.

(Tommy is not, for the record, a good man.)

It would never occur to him, at least not anymore, to do favors for people. Every kindness was calculated. And, in this case, it was calculated to remove any witnesses to his increasingly rapid physical disappearance.

Lizzie asks him about it that night. “You gave the staff mornings off?”

“Had to make up for the past few weeks somehow.”

“Who’s going to make the children’s breakfasts?”

“I will.” The idea was oddly appealing: he remembers helping Pol with dinners in his childhood, because he could read the recipes best of all the boys— he was probably the closest thing the family had to a cook after his mother’s death. He also likes the idea of being around food. In all honesty, he misses it. But he would miss the hunger more.

“ _You_? As in, Thomas Shelby?” She laughs to herself as she takes pins out of her hair.

“Last I checked, that was my name, Lizzie.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I would think this was some kind of scheme, Tommy.”

“Yes, this is all planning for the Great Scone Robbery of 1932.” He says, straight-faced.

She hums a little _hmm_ as she takes her robe off, drapes it on a chair.

“What is it?”

“There was a time when you smiled. Or, I could have sworn there was. Hard to remember now.” She sighs with a slight ironic smile and turns out the light. “Goodnight, love.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "New chapter so soon?" I hear you ask  
> "Gotta get to the gay," I reply solemnly.  
> The much-awaited Tommy/Alfie begins...

Arthur is bleeding. He’s sitting on a table at the Garrison with his long legs resting on the back of a chair. Ada chucked a steak at him,  _stupid tosser_ , which he’s pressing to an impressive contusion on his forehead. He’s using the other hand to swig from a silver flask. 

“What the fuck happened here?”

“The Americans,” Arthur spits out. “You told me not to go above ten percent. So when he suggested 12,5 I told him I’d smash his Brooklyn bollocks on the table if he kept treating me like an idiot.” He winces as the cold meat hits a particularly tender spot. Tommy watches his thin, long fingers gingerly probe the purpling bruises along the side of his face. (Tommy had never noticed how  _thin_ his brother was, or at least had never thought about it like it meant something.)

“How was ‘e s’posed to know they made them so sensitive ‘cross the pond?” Finn laughs. He slaps Arthur’s leg jovially, and they chuckle together, the disappointment of botching the deal forgotten. (And  _look_ at Arthur’s legs, slender as a colt’s, knobby-kneed and fragile-looking, though if Arthur has ever felt  fragile in his life, it was the fragility of a grenade about to drive slivers of shrapnel directly through your brain.)

Anger begins to prickle at the base of Tommy’s skull. 

“This was a straightforward fucking meeting, Arthur. How did it go so completely fucking pear-shaped?”

“They’re Americans, Tom! Any excuse to act like fuckin’ cowboys, right? You can get this back under control, easy.” Something about Arthur’s face— lean cheeks, that bewildered expression that seems to say  _of course Tommy can fix it, he always does_ —  makes Tommy want to crack his pistol on his cheekbone. Instead, he flips a chair over, kicks it for good measure. 

He expects the chair to go flying across the room, wood cracking. It barley moves-- his muscles weren’t cooperating, just sending random, weak impulses, laying slack when he wanted them knotted tight and ready. His anger continues to mount: he couldn’t take this meeting with the union leader, couldn’t delegate properly, and now he can’t even kick a fucking _chair_. 

He writes a mental note to go to the boxing gym, try to get his strength up. He needs to move, to get somewhere, because lately he feels like he’s swimming through tar. _Movement_. The thought somehow makes the tide of rage recede.

“So how in the hell are we supposed to move the opium?” Michael asks Arthur, arms crossed and eyes blazing. 

“It’s alright, Michael.” Tommy’s breath starts to normalize. “It’s alright. I know someone who can help.”

* * *

A maid with a barely-controlled bouquet of black curls silently opens the door and offers a hand to take his coat. He declines (he doesn’t put it past the bastard to go through his pockets, and he’s cold anyway) and moves into the sitting room without invitation. 

“You look like Hell, mate. And I should know, being dead an’ all.”

“Lovely to see you, too, Alfie.”

“Maybe it’s the blindness in my left eye, y’know, but right now, mate, hurts to look at you.”

“I seem to recall seeing you leave a German prison camp, and not looking so grand, either.”

“Touché, Shelby, touché.” Alfie leans over, back stiff, suppressing a gasp of pain, to grab a decanter off the side table. He pours a lash of liquor into a crystal glass. “I would offer you some, right, but I hear you don’t touch the stuff anymore.”

“They keep you well-informed for a man in Hell, do they?”

He spreads his hands in a grand gesture, smiling. “What can I say? Everybody wants to be mates with old Solomon, yeah?”

Tommy sits down opposite the other man. Slightly amused by his old comrade’s ability to garner information from the afterlife, he smiles when he asks: “Who told you I don’t drink?”

“Your brother, weren’t it, was seen wining and dining a man from the American dockworker’s union in London. I deduced, right, with my superior powers of logic, that the only reason you would send him in your place is because you’ve given up the wining part of the equation.” He knocks back the rest of his glass. “Although, looking at you, you’ve also given up the dining part.”

Tommy's neutral mask remains unfaltering.

“If I were a less charitable man, right, I would say that what you’e doing is committing suicide, innit,” he braces himself with his cane to lean in closer to Tommy, mock-whispering: “but real slow so no one will notice.”

“If I wanted psychoanalysis, I’d have gone to Vienna.”

“Why  _did_ you come here, then?”

“Some trouble with exporting, we—“

Alfie shifts back in his seat, sighing. He picks up his now-empty glass and rolls it between his fingers. “This in’t meant to be patronizing, but we’ve a lot in common, yeah? Both served in the War. And, not to be overly political, right, but both members of oppressed groups. Our mothers both, in their own ways, fled from hardship. Mine all the way to that shithole they call Camden Town, and yours—“

“Straight into the Cut.” Tommy finishes for him, in a harsh whisper. 

“Right. So I like to think I have some  _insight_ , innit, into your actions. So don’t treat me like a total idiot and tell me that rot about  _business_. Why’d you come  _here_ , to Margate, to this place that’s only fit for the dead?”

“I needed to see a ghost.” Tommy replies, still straight-faced but with an infinite weariness in his eyes. 

“And now that you’ve seen one?”

“Like looking in a mirror.” 

He stands with some difficulty. The old floorboards creak under his cane. “Alright, mate, I’m making you dinner.”

“Alfie Solomon, the  _cook_?”

“Are you doubting my abilities?”

He offers Tommy his arm. Tommy looks at him askance. 

“Alright, do it your way, stubborn bastard.”


	5. Chapter 5

Two days later he’s at Polly’s house, trying to focus on what she’s saying but thinking, still, about the half a bowl of matzo ball soup he’d eaten at Alfie’s. For some reason, his mind keeps flashing to images, fractured and in rapid succession, of all the people he’s killed and maimed in all his years as a Blinder.

“Have you seen Michael?” she asks.

 _The scent of chicken broth invades his senses like a squadron of enemy troops. He doesn’t want to eat, he doesn’t want to_ want _anything—_

_Billy Kimber’s blood, which he found in thousands of microscopic droplets, like a spring mist of rain, all over his white shirt—_

_“Are you going to help me move the opium or not?”_

_Alfie looks up from the pot of soup he’s reheating. “Are you going to eat this soup, mate?”_

“Tommy?”

“Oh— no, not recently. “

“He seems worried about you.” She says, pretending to take an interest in straightening the table settings.

_“You know, I reckon there are other men who’ve got what you’ve got. Wanting to starve to death— must feel like they’re back in France.”_

_“If I eat this soup, will you stop trying to be a psychoanalyst and go back to being a gin runner?”_

_“I thought my intellectual musings, as it were, would be of use to you, but if you insist.”_

“Fancy that,” Tommy says with the same perfunctory conversational tone.

_Ripping his cap off his head, fumbling for the razor blade in the lining. Vincente Changretta strapped to a chair, stiff with terror—_

_Raising the spoon to his lips. Broth is_ barely _food, he reasoned with himself. Still, the feeling of having something inside him where he’d gotten so used to nothingness was terrifying. But he was so hungry—_

“He wanted to know if you’d been to a doctor.”

“ _He_ wanted to know that, did he?”

“He thought you were dying. Brain cancer or something like that. Erratic behavior, losing your balance. And you’re losing weight like mad, of course.”

_That peculiar scent that hangs in the air, hot and metallic, after a gun is shot. Trying to remember the name of the Irishman he’d shot— what, five years ago now? Longer? Back when his biggest concern was Inspector Campbell. Christ—_

_“Good, innit?” Alfie asks, grinning like a schoolboy as Tommy gingerly sips broth._

_Horrible, he thinks. Wonderful. Both—_

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I didn’t need a doctor to know what’s wrong with you. The sickness is the same it’s always been: the war. In France, and at home. It’s inside you now.”

A war in his mind. Sounded accurate enough.

“You think I’m going mad, Aunt Pol?”

“No, you’re still entirely yourself. There’s just… less of you than there was before.”

He wonders if she can tell how little of him is here right now, and how much of him is still hovering, ghost-like, around a table in Margate, suddenly relearning what it means to feel guilt.

“Do you remember Greta Jurossi’s cousin? Pretty girl called Christina?” She asks.

“Not very well. She died of tuberculosis when we were young.”

“Is that what I told you it was? Well. Suppose it’s never too late for the truth. She was pregnant, and she lost the child. A little bit after, she just... stopped eating. She wasn’t a part of this world anymore, Thomas. Some part of her soul… fled. And she couldn’t hang on to the world of the living much longer.”

_“I thought you said you knew how to cook.”_

_“I’ve put it on the stove, haven’t I?”_

_Alfie’s expression is so earnest, and Tommy surprises himself by laughing._

_Tommy never thought much about how he looked— women seemed to be attracted to him, but whether that was because he was handsome or because he was dangerous was difficult to discern._

_Grace had said he was handsome, called him “Blue Eyes” on nights when he would stay up late drinking, and she would sing to him._

_Alfie Solomons wasn’t, technically speaking, good-looking, but Tommy likes looking at his face. Certainly more than he likes looking at his own._

“Tommy!”

“Yeah, Pol?”

“Where are you?”

_Verdun. A tunnel. The kitchen of a Jewish gin distiller. In a ballroom, watching Grace bleed out. Holding my son. In a minefield in a mirror in a war in my mind—_

“I’ve got a lot to think about. Haven’t gotten enough sleep.” He pulls a cigarette from his case, waving a hand dismissively. He pulls out his lighter, but it takes him four or five tries to get the flint to strike. Shaky hands.

“If Michael is thinking about my health, it’s only because he thinks I’m weak enough to sweep aside and take my place.”

“Is it so hard to believe people care for you, Thomas?”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. PLEASE excuse my attempts at authentic Old Timey Brummie Slang. I'm trying.  
> 2\. There might be Tommy/Alfie in this fic if I decide to truly go full self-indulgence. Let me know if you're interested in that at all.  
> 3\. This is a very short chapter mostly because this was a bonkers idea and I have no idea what I'm doing, so if no one reads it I will understand and hang it up (flatscreen) before I waste too much time.


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